In 2005, the award-winning writer David Foster Wallace was invited to give the commencement address at Kenyon College. He opened his address with a short parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’
Are you religious?
This is a question that, for most people throughout history, would have sounded like, “What the hell is water?” to a fish. As philosopher Charles Taylor notes, the question itself would have been nonsensical to the medieval mind. Taylor dedicates his seminal A Secular Age to addressing the problem of, “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God, in, say 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”
In recent decades, when Americans have been asked the question, “Are you religious?” their answers have increasingly been, “No.”
28% of Americans claim to be non-religious. Among Gen Z, that number jumps up to 40%. As I wrote about last week in “Why Didn’t Your Grandparents Deconstruct?” there are deeper reasons for why younger generations have left Christianity that go way beyond church hurt, moral failures of leaders, bad theology, or unanswered questions.
Previous generations may have changed churches or left one understanding of God and the world for another–like “converting” from Catholic to Lutheran, or as in much of Asia, adding elements of Daoism to a Buddhist or Confucian view. But seeing yourself as “non-religious” is a relatively new phenomenon.
The jump from just 6% of American adults identifying as non-religious (or “nones”) in 1991 to 29% in 2024 is an astounding historical development; and while there are signs that the number of nonesmay be plateauing or even in decline, there still remain deeper questions about why so many people recently started saying “no” to the religious question:
Why is being “non-religious” suddenly an option for people at all?
What changed?
Our Understanding of What Religion Is Changed
Like David Foster Wallace’s fish that did not have a separate category for the water they swam within, the pre-modern mind did not have a distinct, separate box for religion. To the ancient and medieval mind, religion wasn’t one separate compartment of life—it was life. The idea that you could opt out of religion, like canceling your Netflix subscription, would’ve made no sense.
In our “secular age,” as philosopher Charles Taylor describes it, religion has slowly been reduced since the Enlightenment to a privatized compartment—a set of spiritual, supernatural doctrines you choose as if you’re selecting what non-provable beliefs to put on your plate at an existential Old Country Buffet. If you don’t put anything on your plate, that’s up to you, too, right?
Until just a few hundred years ago in Western thought, virtually no one thought about religion like this. You didn’t “have” a religion, you lived within one. We get the word “religion” from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind” or “re-bind.” Religion was the guiding story, rituals, and values that bound a culture together.
No one can live unbound.
As 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich argued, it is better to understand religion as being about the story you live in that tells you what should be “of ultimate concern.” Or to put it another way, religion is about how we answer:
What is your highest value?
What is most worthy of your attention?
What is it that gives life meaning?
What directs your sense of how you ought to live?
Whether you are consciously aware of your answers to these questions or not, we all live in such a way that the answers to these questions become implied through our actions. Where does your attention go most of the day? Where do you spend most of your time and resources? The answer to these questions reveals what we worship.
No one is godless.
Later in that same commencement speech, David Foster Wallace unexpectedly made a similar argument:
“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”
While not a theologian, what David Foster Wallace was suggesting was not altogether different from Tillich. Humans are inescapably religious because religion is about what we believe is of ultimate concern in life.
Wallace offered another observation in his trademark ironic tone that, while being sloppy in its theology, is equally astute. He challenged his audience to consider whether the thing they worship as their ultimate concern is profane (money, prestige, sex, etc) or sacred (a source of meaning that transcends us). The profane offers us pseudo-meaning, the fool’s gold of meaning in life that “will eat you alive” if you worship it as worthy of your ultimate concern.
So, while we can say on an existential level that everyone has something they pursue as worthy of their ultimate concern and are therefore inescapably religious, there is also significant evidence that nones also pursue what they believe are transcendent, sacred, and “spiritual” sources of meaning.
has shown that even people who identify as non-religious still pursue “religious substitutes” in a quest to find a transcendent source of meaning in life. As Routledge writes about in his book Supernatural: Death, Meaning and the Power of Invisible World, the “decline of traditional religion has been accompanied by a rise in a diverse range of supernatural, paranormal and related beliefs.”
“Paranormal Tourism,” where people seek out haunted houses for some contact with powers or spirits that transcend them, has become a booming business. Paranormal or “dark tourism” became a 31.9 billion dollar market in 2023.
30% of Americans consult astrology, tarot, or psychic services at least once a year—this trend is strongest among younger adults, especially women ages 18–49 and those who identify as LGBTQ+. That’s the same percentage of Americans who attend church weekly.
In America, over 70% of nones believe they’ve experienced spiritual energies in trees, crystals, and other parts of nature. When there are a variety of religious terms to describe these kind of beliefs, such as animism, paganism, pantheism, and more, is it really accurate to say that these people are non-religious?
According to Routledge, a growing number of nones, “have even embraced the idea that extraterrestrials are responsible for human civilization, and will one day welcome us into a larger cosmic community once we reach some baseline level of enlightenment.”
In Evangelical terminology, you might call this an Ancient Aliens™ plan of salvation.
If we properly classified these beliefs as “religious,” then it is approximated that the number of nones shrinks down from 29% of American adults to only 2-3% (reflecting the number of dogmatic atheists who hold to the view of reductive physicalism).
As I explore in more detail in my forthcoming book, Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning (Nelson Books, 2026), humans are fundamentally “storied creatures” who cannot live without a guiding story that addresses their spiritual yearnings. A recent study published in The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion confirmed that nones don’t necessarily have fewer spiritual yearnings than those who identify as religious; they just “do so in myriad ways, yet they may prefer personalized means of discovery to those offered by traditional religions.”
Being “non-religious” isn’t really an option.
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Most “nones” are still unconsciously swimming in Christian ethics—compassion, concern for victims, suspicion of power—as if they’re just cultural defaults. What happens when generations of nones raise more nones, disconnected from the source of those values? Is there a point where the moral water evaporates?
Good follow up piece to your previous post about deconstruction. Have you read "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World"? Burton makes similar arguments you share here, that essentially the "nones" aren't really "nones" but are living outside the bounds of classically defined "religion" and have remixed their own religious cocktails from various scripts. I recommend it. I also think of Bonhoeffer who foresaw a "religionless" West in the "world come of age" - a time we now inhabit - when the assumption that humans are religious *a priori* would be rejected and the church would no longer have the monopoly on giving people answers to their ultimate questions. He believed it would end up being a good thing for the church so that Christians would recover the heart of following Christ rather than worshipping Christianity/religion/tradition.
Most “nones” are still unconsciously swimming in Christian ethics—compassion, concern for victims, suspicion of power—as if they’re just cultural defaults. What happens when generations of nones raise more nones, disconnected from the source of those values? Is there a point where the moral water evaporates?
Good follow up piece to your previous post about deconstruction. Have you read "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World"? Burton makes similar arguments you share here, that essentially the "nones" aren't really "nones" but are living outside the bounds of classically defined "religion" and have remixed their own religious cocktails from various scripts. I recommend it. I also think of Bonhoeffer who foresaw a "religionless" West in the "world come of age" - a time we now inhabit - when the assumption that humans are religious *a priori* would be rejected and the church would no longer have the monopoly on giving people answers to their ultimate questions. He believed it would end up being a good thing for the church so that Christians would recover the heart of following Christ rather than worshipping Christianity/religion/tradition.